THE QUIET ONES: Going Through the Motions

Teal and orange have made a serious comeback, at least in Frederik Louis Hviid’s new Danish heist thriller The Quiet Ones. It’s an uninspiring choice that compliments the fact that this movie is packed with pretty much every cliché in the book. You have the mean racist guy, the sick and twisted guy who just enjoys violence, the “criminal with a good heart,” the weapons expert, the rich guy with contacts, and the wives of these robbers who do nothing other than tend to the kids or get beaten up in a domestic violence incident.

To be fair, however, the one thing that breaks The Quiet Ones apart from the movies it owes tribute to — like Heat, Den of Thieves, The Raid: Redemption, or Widows — is that it feels much more invested in the procedural setup and the accuracy of the real-life event it wants to depict: the largest heist in Denmark’s history. It doesn’t rush itself, and it prides itself on getting the facts right.

Great Opening

The first sequence in the film is the most interesting. We get a five-minute single-take of a heist from the inside of an armored van. The two drivers are accosted by masked men, who realize the plan is going awry when they can’t find the access keys they need, and they shoot and kill the drivers.

The camera is patient and slow in its movements in the scene, contrasting with the hectic screaming of all the actors within it. Hviid utilizes the various windows and mirrors as blocking mechanisms for the sequence, and the action eventually turns into split-screen, when one kill is portrayed from the windshield and the other from the sideview mirror, side-by-side. It’s a kind of meticulously planned sequence that grabs your attention right away. But the rest of the movie lets go of the rope.

Caricatures and Cliches

Scored with a very bland synth and percussion score that we’ve all heard a dime a dozen in these kinds of movies as well as drone shots of cars barreling down a highway, The Quiet Ones feels like someone’s simulation of “what an action movie should be.” The Quiet Ones desperately feels the need to create intensity when the visuals don’t demand it. The main character is Kaspar (Gustav Geise), a Danish boxer who decides to get in on the robbery for his one chance at scoring big money and securing a future for his family. He isn’t hesitant to do the crime, but you can tell right away from how he and his crew leader Slimani (Reda Kateb) exchange overlong suspicious looks that he isn’t thrilled with the people he’s supposed to be trusting.

Both characters are defined not through their work but through their treatment of their partners. Kaspar has fun with his kid and treats his wife with distance but respect, while Slimani abuses his wife. This portion of the movie made me roll my eyes a bit because it seemed such a disingenuous of way of contrasting the humanism of its characters while doing basically nothing to make their home lives seem anything more than two-dimensional.

Conclusion

Hviid is dedicated to the police procedural and crime procedural aspects, where the characters discuss the planning and dump the exposition, but he continuously wants to create the suspense of action on the brink. Because of this, we get high-testosterone checking between the characters throughout that feels like it is being held back from breaking into outright violence. This is frustrating because the movie doesn’t really have anything going for it other than the anticipation of the heist sequence. It would work if we were dealing with Jules Dassin’s Rififi kind of brilliantly executed crime, but this treats its heist sequence with more cross-cutting between characters and locations than the Joker/Tumbler chase in The Dark Knight.

I have to admit I am generally a sucker for these kinds of movies because I truly feel there isn’t a genre more repeatable than the “a bunch of guys who get together to pull off a job” movie. There are so many directions you can take such a premise in, and even if you decide to play your story like The Quiet Ones does, the worst you’re going to get is something that’s merely OK. And that’s what this is.

The Quiet Ones is now playing in theaters and available to rent on VOD.